Kelvin

Yes same here. There are specialist brokers that will insure you which I did just yesterday. Our current insurer is NFUM and they wouldn’t insure us for buildings or contents until the house is fully complete. Fortunately they are allowing us to keep our various animals and farm vehicles insured with them.

Pooling water isn’t ideal and on the long list of reasons why flat roofs fail that’s one of them. I assume the roof has a fall but is sagging at this point. What’s the underbuild? Did the roofers install this or was the new membrane installed over the existing underbuild? Can you easily get to it from the inside? How does it interface with the upstand at the pitched roof?

I couldn’t find anyone local to do it until the air tightness test guy turned up and he said he’d started doing it. Too late by then.

It also depends on what you mean by contemporary vs traditional vs modern. The architects will tell you contemporary and modern are very different and likely very different to what the average layperson thinks of them. Plus you could have a more traditional exterior look but with a very contemporary or modern interior using modern building materials and building approach.

This is great advice. I was in a house recently where the MVHR was really obvious and the owner admitted they’d undersized it. I had a design done that I threw away (and got my money back) it was impossible to install in the house. In the end we used half the ducting they’d originally specified.

I don’t know about gold standard but it is a good product and commonly used under sedum roofs. It’s used a lot on big commercial roofs. Sarnafil is another similar product that’s more common around where I am as most of the flat roofs use it. Both can be applied direct to PIR.

😂 We would have loved to have done that. Our plot would have been a great site for such a design. Our initial rough drawing was a small longhouse as a top storey so the bit you see and the next two floors beneath it buried in the hill with the bottom floor extending forward into the site. Inspired by the Grand Design couple that spent £100k digging the hole in the side of the hill. We ruled it out because the cost/risk profile was too high for us, I couldn’t find a groundswork company that had done anything like it up here and we were advised it would be hard to get through planning. Two long rectangles it was then 😂

Always helpful to post some images. Anonymise them first though as this site is publicly searchable. Groundswork is the least predictable part of the build. You don’t know exactly what you have until the machines start excavating. Local companies are great to use though as they are more familiar with the ground. Also don’t be lulled into the mindset that £100k is good because you’ve already had a very high quote. As @nod said muck away is dear. We were lucky as we had somewhere to put ours so we didn’t remove anything from the site.

I have got pissed off with some of the trades who forget this is our home not a building site. One guy swept the back of his van onto the parking area then buggered off. I swept it all up and dumped it back in his van on the last day he was here. He tried to deny it was his until I pulled out a business card with his name on it. Another guy threw is empty lunch stuff on the floor despite me having bin bags nailed to the walls. I dumped that in his brand new van. He wasn’t at all pleased about that and couldn’t get his thick head around why it was equally not ok to dump stuff on the floor of our home. They’ve not all been bad. Some of the trades are scrupulously clean and tidy. I don’t get any of that from friends I loan stuff to. If I did I’d either tell them how I expect it returned or tell them to take it away and clean it or if it bothered me as much as it bothers you I wouldn’t lend stuff.

That’s bound to be the case with some folk but for many others it won’t be so sweeping generalisations have no place in such a debate. Look at the thread where the LPA is forcing them to build a bungalow like all the others in the street with no deviation from the norm. Also look at all the new housing estates where they are building more or less exactly the same design which is all driven by profit. You can apply the boring it just has to work design principle to everything in life but it would be a pretty boring World to live in.

Sure but architecture is more than building square boxes.

I’d try and use a specifically designed edge flashing where possible rather than try and use the membrane to make the water seal. Have a look here. There are loads of drawings showing how to detail different situations. This is for Alwitra obviously but the general principles will be the same. https://www.icb.uk.com/downloads/waterproofing-sdrawings

There’s a balance to strike between building a square box with few windows and building a completely curved building full of glass. I don’t watch Grand Designs much but I was also impressed with the folk that built really interesting looking buildings that broke convention.

The Knauf stuff I used was quite pleasant to use. No itchiness or dust. Easy to cut too.

Is OSB the standard underbuild for EPDM? I’d be using exterior grade plywood. Our flat roof uses Alwitra Avalon VSK membrane on 18mm plywood. The cut in for the gutter in your picture would worry me. That shape Looks hard to detail correctly. Would it not be better to try and build it as a more straightforward L shape.

You need to get several quotes but you also need your full SE foundation design and drainage plans. None of the groundsworks companies I contacted would quote without it. As for the cost it does look horrendously high. Our site was similar to yours also requiring a 30m retaining wall and the total cost was £67k which included a treatment plant, drainage field and rainwater attenuation.

I really feel for you. It beggars belief just how poor some planning authorities are.

I thought it had to go outside?

We didn’t want the silvered weathered look. Well we did in the beginning but we liked the very light pale golden colour the natural SiOO:X treatment achieves. They do a coloured version of it that achieves a light grey and mid grey for the immediate weathered silvered look.

Have you asked your zinc roofer what they think? They’ll have seen every manner of detail joining two different sections together. Other options are GRP or a membrane like Alwitra or Sarnafil but those would have to be done first I expect . It is a slightly odd difficult junction.

You’ve missed my point. My point was not about how cheaply something can be done, it was about if you want to achieve a particular look then there’s quite likely a cost associated with it. There are loads of houses and extensions around us that are wood clad and all bar two look crap to me as the cladding has weathered exactly the way cladding weathers with hardly any weathering in the protected areas, silvered in the centre and stained at the bottom. The two fully clad houses the cladding has weathered completely differently on each elevation as you might expect to happen and one if them has black marks on every fixing point. On one of the houses I looked at the battens have failed and the cladding is coming off the walls after 15 years. We had a very particular set of criteria for the cladding and after looking at all manner of ways to do it we concluded that the options were the SiOO:X treated Russwood system or Adodo. The Abodo was too dear albeit it’s a beautiful wood and I might use it for the media wall. In terms cost we went with the full Russwood system of thermopine battens, Sihga screws, the Kompefix compensation strip, and the SiOO:X treatment. All of that was dearer than the cladding. We could have done it for less than half the cost we paid but we wouldn’t have achieved the look we wanted. We’ll find out about the longevity. Building a house, where money isn’t unlimited, is series of competing compromises between structural, serviceability, and aesthetic. The structural stuff is what it is a lot of the time as the ground dictates what you need to do. The other two comes down to choices that you make based on your preferences or priorities.

Yes but your time isn’t free if you could be earning. In my case I retired early from a very highly paid job for example. As I said earlier we are at £2100/m2 for a good spec through using trades (which were a bit of a mixed bag), careful buying (time consuming) and DiY (slow) We could have built for a fair bit less. For example, we used Scottish Larch from Russwood that was treated with a relatively dear product. It cost about a third more than buying the larch locally and not treating it at all. However, our house is fully clad in this and it was such an important part of the overall visual look that it was important we got this right.

Anything is possible. The last time I was in Ikea they had mock up of small apartments that made clever use of the space including funky bed arrangements that doubled up as other functions. However having to hall your bed up and down every day doesn’t sound like fun.

We had the oak handrail fitted the other week. I wanted it fitted as one continuous handrail so you can run your hand up and around the corner for the full flight without lifting off. Not terribly easy to do. I also spent many hours sanding this prior to oiling then did several coats of oil sanding between coats. Consequently it’s silky smooth and a lovely thing to touch. Between this and the door handles it will be the bit of the house we’ll touch the most. Same with the kitchen cabinets. We wanted a matt finish for a few reasons one of which was how it feels when you touch it. The door handles weren’t dear but we ordered several different handles before choosing these and chose them because the curve fits your hand.

Our main kitchen cost £20k including all the appliances and the large quartz counter top which was £3500 alone. The kitchen furniture was about £11k I think. We bought it two years before we fitted it so avoided some of the inflation costs and it was kept in storage for free.